Behold, your Finnish micro-cabin fantasies come true

Built from recycled materials for around $10,000, Nido is a lakeside cabin in Finland deliberately —and smartly — designed with a teeny-tiny footprint as to avoid building permits and bureaucratic red tape.

If you’re looking for proof that even the tiniest of homes can make the biggest splashes around the interwebs, look no further than Nido, a fabulous Finnish micro-cabin measuring under 100-square-feet. The project first appeared back in February on Tiny House Listings; I noticed it for the first time earlier this week on Design Milk. And then boom! Nido has gone viral over the past couple of days, appearing all over blogosphere on sites ranging from Core77 to Gizmodo. And there’s a good reason it did.

Nido is a compact, minimalist beauty of a habitable shack nestled amongst a grove of trees near a lake. Basically, Nido seductively whispers, come, leave all your worries behind and hide out in me for a spell. Or, according to the home’s owner/designer Robin Falck, "it’s a great place to “lay back and enjoy the starlight along with some smooth jazz.”

The reason Nido (the word loosely translates to “birds nest” in Italian) is so tiny (96-square-feet with a 50-square-foot sleeping loft, to be exact) is primarily due to the fact that in Finland, one can circumvent the oft-pesky housing permitting process by building a structure measuring under 96-square-feet or 128-square-feet depending on the location. The home, which in addition to a sleeping loft includes a living area, kitchen, bathroom, and spacious deck, was built on the cheap in just under two weeks. As mentioned, Falck designed the cabin himself, calling in for assistance from professional architects for a couple of technical features. Admits Falck: “I was surprised how affordable the whole project was. Most of the materials are recycled and I haven’t really calculated how much it finally cost, but the ballpark figure is something like $10,500 + the man hours.”

Right after completing work on his woodsy hermitage in the summer of 2010, Falck was called off for a year of compulsory military service. It must have been painful to part from Nido after all that hard work, but what a lovely place to come back to for hours upon hours of nothing but lake swimming, stargazing, and smooth jazz-ing.

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